Age of Propoganda

I am now looking to read Pratkanis and Aronson's book The Age of Propoganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. The book is essentially aimed at helping people "arm themselves" against propoganda spread by governments and businesses. I discovered it via a review written by J. Scott Armstrong from the Department of Marketing at The Wharton School.

The book discusses the power of rhetoric and the use of persuasion, and collects and summarizes numerous published works on persuasion. Citing Klamer and McClosky's "One Quarter of GDP is Persuasion", Armstrong concludes that "persuasion is big business."

Klamer and McClosky's piece itself, although dated (1995), is interesting. Besides having been written by McClosky back when she was still Don and not Deirdre and back when I was in frequent communication with him(her) as a potential scholar to serve on my then-still-in-the-"someday"-stage dissertation committee, it contains a subtle tint of much of McClosky's searing critique of economics as a so-called "value free" science while still effectively using the statistics that economists love so much to convince them of its argument.

Nonetheless, I am going to read Age of Propoganda and see if it convinces me, or at least makes me more aware of when someone is sweet talking me with rhetoric that needs a deeper examination.